FreePBX 2.6 Beta 2 – Come Join the Fun

If you don’t keep an eye on the regular activity via the FreePBX Timeline or other means you may not be aware of the immense activity that has been going on with FreePBX 2.6. (You mean you don’t have that bookmarked as your home page because you have real work to do?:-)

FreePBX 2.6 Beta 1 has been available for download for quite some time and so far has proven to be quite reliable. We’ve been a bit stealthy in announcing it while spending a lot of time housekeeping so that you can get a good picture of what its current state is.

You can click on the 2.6 Milestone to get a good snapshot and summary of where things are and what the current state is, and from there you can drill down to see all the tickets associated with 2.6. At the time of this writing, we show 421 closed tickets (feature requests and bugs) and only 14 open (97% complete).

The Milestone gives the best summary but some highlights included in 2.6 are provided here. One exciting addition is the option to view an Extended Online Module Repository which not only includes the standard (and new) modules that are regularly supported by the Core FreePBX team, but also includes several popular and commonly requested modules that are available but may have been hard to find in the past and more tedious to download. Some of the new modules (including those available through the Extended Repository) include :

Asterisk SIP Settings & Asterisk IAX Settings

Provides the ability to manage common global SIP and IAX settings that have often been confusing and error prone to do in configuration files, and includes a handy auto-configuration helper to determine your sip_nat.conf related settings (and further eliminates the need for that file).

Outbound Route Messages

Allows the ability to override the default “All Circuits Busy” message encountered when all trunks fail, and allows for explicit messages to be played for Emergency Routes.

Weak Password Checks

Provides an auditing function for all your SIP and IAX passwords to help harden your system and protect it from the many automated scripts on the internet seeking out and exploiting such systems. Because of the security implications, this module was also introduced earlier into version 2.5.

Bulk Extensions & Bulk DIDs

Allows you to manage or provision large quantities of users and DIDs from a spreadsheet format.

Custom Context & Route Permissions

Provide some advanced functionality to limit routes or other features and capabilities to different extensions.

There are many other enhancements such as FOP 0.30 Updated to work with Asterisk 1.6, Virtual Extensions, many Queue updates and more. Some are highlighted in the 2.6 Milestone but many more are buried in the tickets or by looking through the GUI. As always, the best way to determine what is new is to load up the new version and start to explore, and at the same time, help us validate to move it into a released state!

In the mean time, for those of you exploring the “bleeding edge”, progress on FreePBX 3.0, which was announced earlier this month at ClueCon, is going great! It still remains very much a developer release, with a developer ISO currently available to check it out, but there has been a lot of dev interest which you can observe if you stop by the #freepbx-dev IRC channel (please keep in mind that channel is for development related questions and discussions, #freepbx remains the standard User channel).